Tropics of abjection

Figures of violence and the Afro-Caribbean semiotic

Bibliographic Data

ID2179262
AuthorsEric Morales-Franceschini
Year2019
Volume55
Issue4
Pages512-526
Publication date2019-07-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17449855.2019.1581833
OpenAlexW2937484952
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited17

This article teases out elective affinities between Julia Kristeva's theorization of the abject and certain (Afro-)Caribbean writers' figurations of racialized alterity and violence in the (post)colony. It argues that whereas Kristeva relies on the tropes of refuse and the corpse to classify the volatile experience she calls abjection, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant and others invoke tropes of bareness and monstrosity (i.e. zombies, cannibals) to characterize and denounce racialized violence. It argues that whereas Kristeva relies on an understanding of the abject as intimately tethered to the pre-Oedipal, writers such as Michelle Cliff and Edwidge Danticat offer us exemplary works that tend to the abject and semiotic praxis by imaginatively drawing on the pre-colonial, not least its valuations of matrilineal power and wisdom. The article registers these affinities and speculates on what the differences bespeak about violence vis-à-vis the (M)other and blackness

Aesthetics · Afro-Caribbean · Alterity · Art · Caribbean literature · Colonialism · Epistemology · Ethnology · Literature · Martinique · Power (physics · Praxis · Semiotics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Torture · West indies · Anthropology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · History · Philosophy

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